Almost every content marketer we talk to has the same question.
(You might be the exception, but we bet you’re not.)
The question is this:
How do you create more content—think, double, triple or even 10X the amount of content you’re creating now—without hiring a corresponding number of marketers to create it?
Don’t get us wrong. Hiring skilled content marketers is one of the top ways to create campaigns that generate leads and make money.
But it’s not always possible to double, triple, or 10X the number of marketers on your staff to execute a big increase in content production.
Even with freelancers, it can become prohibitively expensive or time-consuming.
AI in content marketing can help solve your problem. But, you need to understand the nuances and limitations of AI in content marketing if you want to get real results.
What AI Can and Can’t Do for Content Marketers
We’ve got some good news and we’ve got some bad news.
The good news is the promise and power of artificial intelligence in marketing is real. This technology, when applied correctly, can help you cost-effectively improve, optimize, and scale content creation.
The bad news?
AI can’t do everything. It can’t automatically create all types of content from scratch without human involvement. (Though, as we’ll see, it can create some very specific types of content.)
But overall, AI isn’t going to replace your team of content creators any time soon.
We think that’s a good thing.
Because AI can help human writers do incredible work at scale. Oh boy, can it help.
Let’s look at a few ways AI tools can augment, enhance, and accelerate your team’s content creation.
These examples should give you an idea of what’s possible with AI in content marketing, and inspire you to experiment with some of the top tools available.
AI Use Cases and Tools for Creating Content at Scale
So, what’s actually possible when you use AI in your content creation?
Glad you asked.
Here are some of our favorite use cases and tools.
1. Create exceptional content at scale.
Enterprises spend a shocking amount of time on organizing, editing, and standardizing content once it’s been created.
Think about it: Big companies have multiple offices and distributed teams all creating content for different business units and markets.
All the content these teams create must meet corporate standards, align with the brand’s tone and style, and (usually) get through legal.
Fail any one of these tests, and you create long hours and intense headaches for content creators and editors.
All of this takes time away from, you guessed it, actually creating great content.
This is an area where AI can help in a big way.
AI systems exist that “read” your content and make sure you stay on-topic, on-tone, and aligned with overall brand guidelines—all autonomously and in real-time.
These systems analyze content based on literally thousands of factors, including desired tone of voice, approved language and terms to avoid, and style and formatting preferences.
That makes it easy to standardize content across writers and teams, without spending a ton of time overseeing content creation to make sure it’s on-brand and compliant. Instead, a machine system scores the content produced by writers and recommends ways to raise your score based on what your brand sees as desirable.
So, while AI can’t completely write content for you, it can free up hundreds of hours each month that you can then reinvest into creating more and better content.
One solution in this space to check out is Acrolinx, a content strategy alignment platform powered by AI that does all of the above for major enterprise brands.
2. Automatically write email subject lines and social media ads.
We seem pretty far off from the days of AI writing entire blog articles for you from scratch.
But AI can lighten the load by automated some narrow content creation tasks.
A tool called Phrasee uses sophisticated AI to automatically write marketing email subject lines that perform better than humans.
The company also recently released a tool that writes Facebook and Instagram ad copy for you.
Phrasee uses an AI technology called natural language generation (NLG) to automatically create copy that sounds like it was written by humans.
Because it works so fast at scale, you can create tons of variations of each subject line or ad, without a corresponding rise in cost or time investment.
The result?
Phrasee customers routinely see a significant jump in open rates and conversions, metrics that translate into millions of real dollars for companies selling online.
3. Create content that actually produces performance gains.
There is usually one big obstacle that prevents brands from creating more content at scale, aside from lack of people power.
Companies spend way too much time creating content that doesn’t create an impact.
Think about how many hours are spent on content that, no matter how well-written, fizzles the moment it’s published.
It doesn’t get shared. Or consumed. And it doesn’t rank over time or drive traffic and engagement.
In fact, far too many content marketers can’t create content at scale because they’re too busy creating content that doesn’t actually matter.
We designed MarketMuse to solve this challenge. MarketMuse uses AI to help you plan the perfect content strategy.
It shows you what to write to rank for key topics and terms.
It shows you how to write so each piece of your content is optimally attractive to search engines.
And it even surfaces opportunities to rank that your team hasn’t even considered, including additional subjects you should cover if you want to own a given topic cluster.
(The tool even finds ways you can beat the pages already ranking for certain keywords or topics.)
If you’re looking to create content at scale, we recommend you check out any of the tools we mentioned and start experimenting today.
Only by talking to vendors can you get a clear sense of what’s truly possible for your particular needs.
Click on any of the links above to go straight to a vendor’s website and check out how MarketMuse can analyze your content here:
Jeff Coyle
Jeff Coyle is a data-driven search engine marketing executive with more than 18 years of experience in the search industry managing products and website networks. Jeff is the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer for MarketMuse, where he is focused on helping content marketers, search engine marketers, agencies and e-commerce managers build topical authority, improve content quality and turn semantic research into actionable insights. Before joining as Co-founder at MarketMuse, Jeff owned and operated his own inbound marketing consultancy and managed the Traffic, Search and Engagement team for TechTarget, a leader in B2B technology publishing and lead generation.